this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2024
192 points (94.4% liked)

Linux

47994 readers
1467 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

How does it stack up against traditional package management and others like AUR and Nix?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

purely as an end user i hate how much it downloads with each update and how much it uses the disk space although that's much less of an issue. i know it's solving a real problem and relieving a lot of the headaches of developers maintaing packages for each distro's specific package standard, but it's simply not the software distribution solution for people without at least well enough internet.

i wouldn't use any distro with flatpaks as its main way of delivering software and i would in almost all cases always choose alternatives even if it's outdated. i don't necessarily hate flatpak itself but for me i don't want to spend money on extra data cap and wait 30 minutes for a small update for my game launcher to finish.

the appimage of one of the applications i was interested in was 3 times less than the average flatpak update so redownloading the appimage every time would be better. if i installed more packages yeah the math would be better but it's still wasted data per update no matter how small it actually is. i found out after a while of using flatpak that i wouldn't just update and was stuck with outdated software anyway.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Flatpak updates should generally download changed data, it does a poor job of showing how much this will be in advance though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Yes, also it uses deduplication on the disk, where it is even less space actually used.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

the actual update size for the application is logical as far as i remember, it's the other stuff alongside it (i think related to graphics card) which is the real issue. it added around 500MB each update while the actual update itself might've been 10 or 20 MB.